May 20, 1973

OBITUARY

Ex-Rep. Jeanette Rankin Dies; First Woman in Congress, 92

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the United States Congress and the only Representative who voted against the nation's entry into World Wars I and II, died Friday night at her apartment in Carmel, Calif. She was 92 years old.

Miss Rankin, a lifelong pacifist and one of the country's earliest women suffragists, served only two terms in the House of Representatives, 1917 to 1919 and 1941 to 1943. But in both those terms, by an odd turn of history, the United States decided to go to war.

Her dissenting votes were consistent with her lifelong belief that violence cannot solve human disagreements.

Miss Rankin also introduced the first bill to grant women citizenship independent of their husbands, and authorized the first bill for Government-sponsored instruction of hygiene in maternity and infancy.

A Republican from Missoula, Mont., she ran her campaigns on a peace platform. After leaving the Congress, she devoted her widely admired energy to peace organizations and women's activist groups.

A Long Active Life

Until her health began failing seriously last year, Miss Rankin's only concession to age was a cane and a slight weariness at seeing the ideas she had been advocating for seven decades treated as if they were still radically new.

There were no consciousness-raising groups to liberate Jeanette Rankin in 1916, when, as the United States moved toward war with the Central Powers, the small, trim woman from Missoula undertook her successful Congressional campaign.

"I knew the women would stand behind me," she said when told she had won. "I am deeply conscious of the responsibility. I will not only represent the women of Montana, but also the women of the country, and I have plenty of work cut out for me."

Miss Rankin took her seat in the House of April 2, 1916. Four days later, in the predawn hours of April 6, after months of mounting pressure, she told her colleagues in a moment of high drama: "I want to stand behind my country, but I cannot vote for war."

She then cast her dissenting vote. The final House vote to declare war was 373 to 50. Hers was an unpopular stand, and she became the target of many barbs. But she contended afterward: "I'd go through much worse treatment. If you know a certain thing is right, you can't change it."

After her first term, Miss Rankin sought but lost the Montana Republican nomination for the Senate, and for more than two decades devoted herself to peace organizations, particularly the National Conference for the Prevention of War.

"Prepare to the limit for defense; keep our men out of Europe," was her slogan in 1940 for her second successful race for the House. Many years later, she said: "The women elected me because they remembered that I'd been against our entering World War I."

Despite Pearl Harbor, the pleadings for unanimity by Everett McKinley Dirksen, then a member of the House, and the eloquence of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his Dec. 8, 1941, address to Congress, Miss Rankin cast the only dissent in the 388 to 1 House vote on the Declaration of War against Japan.

"I voted against it because it was war," she said afterward.

In recent years, Miss Rankin, who never married, continued to march and make speeches for the causes in which she believed.

Denounced Vietnam War

She let the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in a massive march on Capit0l Hill in Washington in 1968 to protest the war in Vietnam, which she denounced as a "ruthless slaughter."

The following year she participated in moratorium marches in Georgia and South Carolina. She continued, too, to write letters and to make phone calls and visits to members of Congress, urging an end to United States involvement in Indochina.

In an interview several years ago, Miss Rankin called the Vietnam war "stupid and cruel," and put the blame on "stupid leaders" and a "military bureaucracy." She added: "The people really aren't for war. They just go along, but war is evil, and there is always an alternative."

At the polls, she said, people are given a "choice of evils, not ideas."

As for women, for whose rights she labored a lifetime, Miss Rankin said: "They've been worms. They let their sons go off to war because they're afraid their husbands will lose their jobs in industry if they protest."

Jeanette Rankin was born on June 11, 1880, on a ranch near Missoula, the oldest of seven children of John and Olive Rankin. Her father was a rancher and building contractor, and her mother was a native of New Hampshire who had gone West to be a schoolteacher.

Miss Rankin graduated from the University on Montana in 1902 and went into social work, which took her to New York City. Here, she joined the suffrage movement and lived in the Suffrage League house on East 86th Street. In 1908-09, she was a student at the School of Philanthropy here, then did social work in Seattle for a year, before turning increasingly to the women's movement.

She later became field secretary of the National American Women's Suffrage Association and chairman of the Montana State Suffrage committee. In 1912, she took the suffrage fight home to Montana, addressing the State Legislature-a precedent for a woman-on the subject.

Two years later, Montana passed a suffrage law. This was six years before that right became a Constitutional Amendment. Miss Rankin later said she first ran for Congress "to repay the women of Montana who had worked for suffrage."

Miss Rankin long advocated electoral reforms, with a view to greater diversity among candidates. "Now," she said, "we have a choice between a white male Republican and a white male Democrat." And, with equal vigor, she urged unilateral disarmament, contending: "If we disarmed, we'd be the safest country in the world."